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Almost every conceivable form of “socialism” was tried over the last 100 years. There has been Marxian socialism in the form of Soviet-style fully nationalized economies with strict and comprehensive five-year government central planning. There was national socialism in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, with private enterprise placed under total government control with Nazi four-year central planning. There was Mussolini’s Italian fascism, under which private businesses and workers were forced into cartels and trade unions with government oversight and command of prices, wages, production, work conditions, and trade. There was British “democratic” socialism under the post–World War II Labor-party government, with nationalized industries, socialized health care, and central planning. There was a French version under the name of “indicative” planning, under which the government manipulated prices and production incentives to direct capital and labor where the central planners thought they should go. There have been government planning through regulations and redistributions of wealth through fiscal policy. This regulatory-redistributive model of government oversight and directing of social and economic outcomes grew out of the discovered and admitted inescapable limits and shortcomings of more-direct government planning and control of economic affairs.

Costs and Consequences of Socialism-in-Practice

The human cost experienced from the extreme forms of socialism-in-practice goes beyond most of our imaginations. Tens of millions of people — ordinary, unarmed, and innocent men, women, and children — were starved, tortured, shot, or worked to death in slave-labor camps in the name of building that bright and beautiful paradise on earth that the communists, fascists, and Nazis all promised would belong to those they had designated the righteous and justly deserving social class, national group, or racial tribe. British democratic socialism foundered on the discovery that even in a democracy, government socialist planning entails imposing commands on everyone that succeed in only making life stagnant, dull, and poor for most in society. Indeed, this is how we have ended up with highly regulated economies combined with often-extensive networks of income redistribution and social safety nets.

A Green New Deal Means Central Planning

Now additional voices for a new socialism are on the public scene, such as the recently elected Democratic-party representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Even before being sworn in to the House of Representatives in early January 2019, she and others presented a proposal for a special and select congressional committee for the preparing and implementing of a Green New Deal.

Make no mistake, this is a plan for the introduction of comprehensive government planning over every facet of American social and economic life. Arguing that the world is facing an environmental Armageddon due to global warming, the time for doing nothing or relying upon carbon taxes to reduce use of fossil fuels or business regulations to influence how private enterprises produce goods and services, they say, is behind us.

A Carbon-Free Road to Social Justice

This must be done in conjunction with commitments and goals for “social, economic, racial, regional, and gender-based justice and equality.” Labor unions must have a prominent place, with the ability to direct wages and employment conditions for workplace justice in the pursuit of a post-carbon economy. The federal government should take equity positions — that is, total or partial direct ownership — in businesses, industries, and sectors of the economy as a means to hit the target of radical environmental change.

The goal is to have a “100 percent” fossil fuel–free economy within 10 years. All businesses and residential structures will have to be dramatically made over to environmentally friendly renewable sources of energy. Where and what is produced will have to be commanded by the federal government for both industry and agriculture.

At the same time, this grand and comprehensive central planning of American society to save the planet can also serve as “an historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic opportunity available to everyone participating in the transformation” of the country.

The Hubris of Our Would-Be Central Planners

The hubris just oozes from every presumption according to which these American central planners just know what needs to be done and why everyone else must cheerfully, enthusiastically follow the commands of our would-be national-socialist führers. The plan for this Green New Deal shows its totalitarian premise in each of its proposed elements. No corner of the economy would be exempt from the green planners’ control. Every human association and status in society would be subject to modification as determined by the social-justice warriors in power.

Once Democratically Chosen, No Reversing Socialism

But what happens to democracy after that? What if “the people” have second thoughts in election years 2022 or 2024 or 2026 or 2028? What if other voices challenge the premises and the policies of the Green New Dealers? If planetary existence and social justice for all time are at stake, can our democratic socialists allow the fickle and wrong-headed voting decisions of some of the people to alter the collectivist course that has been taken?

Surely, it would be irrational to permit the central plan to be dismantled, to backslide into chaotic and petty profit-motivated self-interest, to undo all that the revolution had been attempting to achieve. The socially just people’s will could not be allowed to be reversed because of some people’s misinformed and misguided voting whims under the influence of sinister interests swaying them against their true and real interests.

Oh, we have heard all this before, and no doubt, if they were to come to power, we would hear it all once more. But, but … it can’t happen here! Think again. The logic of central planning undermines the institutions and the spirit of liberty. By concentrating power and decision-making in the hands of those in government, socialist central planning first weakens and then eliminates autonomous centers of choice and association.

Property Rights and Personal Choice

One of the most essential aspects of private property rights is that it creates potential centers of control and discretion outside of the clutches of those in political authority. Private property in functioning free markets enables sources of employment and income independent of the government. The individual does not have to worry about loss of a government job, or his government-supplied income and benefits, or his chances for personal betterment due to any disagreement with or peaceful opposition to the policies and practices of the state.

Competitive, free markets provide avenues for a plethora of ways for multitudes of people to simultaneously follow diverse ends with alternative means considered better than those selected by others in society. Mistakes and second thoughts concerning what goals and purposes to pursue and how best to do so may be modified in many different ways by different people at different times, without needing to persuade or gain the electoral agreement of enough others through a voting process.

Central Planning Means Centralized Decision-Making

But this is exactly what our new American socialists are impatient with and want to do away with. There needs to be one master hierarchy of values, with one centrally guiding and implemented master plan to bring it to fruition, with all in the society accepting and making their own personal wishes and desires subordinate to it.

What they really want is a version of “democratic centralism” — that is, an inner circle of people ideologically motivated by the same general collectivist purposes and ideals who bargain over and divide the social spoils for the identity-politics-based factions and interest groups that they, respectively, represent, with no interference from the ignorant “reactionary” and supposedly race- and gender-bigoted individuals and groups who don’t understand the nature of a real “people’s democracy.”

The role of these uninformed masses, who must be constantly subject to government “re-education,” is to produce the wealth and output that the Green New Deal planners need to pursue their power-lusting dreams. And don’t worry, if they cannot plunder enough wealth through taxation to cover the costs of their social-engineering schemes, they say they will turn to the Federal Reserve to create all the paper money they will need to pay for all that they want to do. Welcome to the possibility of a Venezuela-style hyperinflation on the back of a stagnant economy built on the political insanity of those who claim to know how everyone should live under the central planners’ agenda for a new, carbon-free world.

These are dangerous ideas that threaten anew the foundations and functioning of what remains of personal freedom and free enterprise in the United States. The Green New Dealers’ self-righteous fanaticism and ideological enthusiasm for a collectivist America should not be underestimated. Understanding their misguided political assumptions and the damaging economic consequences that would follow from their coming to power is essential if a “green” road to serfdom is to be avoided.

Richard M. Ebeling, an AIER Senior Fellow, is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. This article appeared at AIER.org and has been edited for length.

The seven major positive emotions are routinely used in creative efforts and are synonymous with happiness and the kind of success that the reader should strive to emulate or attain (within reason, of course). On the other hand, the seven major negative emotions are regularly expressed by people who are a drain on the soul and probably on a downward spiral personally, professionally, and financially.

Fast-forwarded to the late 2010s, what type of thorn in the side of decent, hardworking, and traditional people in the United States best embodies the seven major negative emotions? Why, it’s none other than social justice warriors.

I. The Emotion Of Fear

The life of an SJW is filled with irrational fears and slippery-slope diatribes that breach the level of absurdity.

For instance, when Donald Trump was elected president, they thought he was “literally Hitler!” and was going to strip all women, homosexuals, and non-whites (essentially everyone but straight white males) of their civil liberties.

None of these hyperbole-laced arguments has come to pass.

The United States continues to be one of the top countries in the world that offers its women, as well as its racial and sexual minorities, an astoundingly high degree of civil liberties, protections, and even outright privileges that white men cannot take advantage of.

II. The Emotion of Jealousy

SJWs exhibit a truly remarkable level of jealousy, particularly when it comes to financial compensation and the general topic of income inequality.

Many of them find it the crime of the century that petroleum engineers who studied diligently for many years, only to then have to work in some of the most unpleasant conditions imaginable, actually make more money than McDonald’s burger-flippers or pumpkin spice latte-decorators at Starbucks.

Oh, the horror! But it’s (insert current year)! Society should have total income equality by now!

III. The Emotion of Hatred

In recent years, this level of hatred has reached such breaking points to where they tear down public monuments, smash bike locks over people’s heads, and aggressively harass people on the streets of Portland and elsewhere.

Constant hatred can never be channeled into something constructive, and being constructive is not the forte of SJWs.

IV. The Emotion of Revenge

SJWs repeatedly espouse “love” and “equality” for everyone, but it’s pure folly to ignore that revenge against white men is a core component of their manifesto.

In their narrow-minded world, white men (and white men only) have been the source of all suffering and wrongdoing on this planet, and their ascent to power and wealth has come only through female oppression, slavery, land and resource theft from abroad, wars of conquest, and a laundry list of other naughty endeavors.

(To them, major atrocities committed by non-whites such as the Barbary pirates and their Islamic slave trade, Islamic invasions of Europe, Chinese civil wars with eight-figure body counts, the conquests of Tamerlane, the brutality of Imperial Japan, the Rwandan genocide, the ongoing existence of slavery in Mauritania, and the ongoing mass murder and rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo simply don’t compute.)

This thirst for revenge against white men can be achieved only by displacing as many white men as possible from prestigious jobs, tearing down as many statues of white men as possible, and then working hard to have their polar opposite as the replacement. Harriet Tubman replacing Andrew Jackson on the U.S. twenty-dollar bill and the high-profile smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh are perfect examples.

V. The Emotion of Greed

SJWs are a greedy lot, and many of them increasingly act like all sources of financial stress and toil in life should be eliminated via their “it’s the current year” arguments.

Housing? That should be free. Rides on the subway? Those should be free, too. The latest and greatest smartphone offering? Free! The cost of my gender studies degree? Oh, you know that’s gotta be free.

Heck, they’ll think round-trip airfares to Thailand so they can hug elephants for their Instagram feed should be free before long.

VI. The Emotion of Superstition

One of the primary descriptors of “superstition” is assuming false conceptions of causation, and SJWs are riddled with such poor modes of thinking. For instance, don’t even try making a civil and intellectual argument with them about the highly disproportionate black crime rates in the United States.

Despite overwhelming empirical evidence and data that show that it is primarily poor life choices (made under free will) that leads to so many young black men being incarcerated, SJWs will superstitiously insist that only the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and “white supremacy” have created this problem.

VII. The Emotion of Anger

SJWs are always angry and almost never genuinely happy or content. There’s always something or someone out there who must be “resisted” in some way.

Around such people, no trash can is safe from being picked up and hurled in a fit of anger if someone you don’t like is about to give a speech at the local university. Just a simple speech!

People who are constantly angry are awful to work with, a complete social buzzkill, and are probably not succeeding in their personal and professional lives.

In summary, avoid SJWs and all their negative emotions. Choose winners.

Winter is coming, and colder temperatures mean that our coats and scarves have been pulled from their summer resting places and put to good use once more. But if you’re a parent in the United Kingdom, you might want to think twice before you send your kids off to school in their favorite winter coats. This year, certain brand-name apparel is being banned in an effort to combat income inequality.

“Poverty proofing” is all the rage in the UK as educators have become concerned that lower-income students are facing too much social stigma from their peers in public schools. Many fear that this stigma is causing children to become too preoccupied with their family’s financial situation and interfering with their performance in the classroom. Though so far, the impact this has on education appears to be speculative.

Still, the UK has prioritized this issue, even launching a project called Poverty Proofing the School Day. The project’s mission is “to reduce stigma and remove barriers to learning and to assist schools in exploring the most effective way to spend pupil premium allocation.” This is done through school audits where representatives go into schools and speak to students, teachers, and administrators in order to get a feel for the culture and environment of the campus. After the audit has taken place, an action plan is formulated to address the stigmatizing policies or practices of each school.

One school is taking this concept of poverty proofing to extremes by outlawing certain designer-name coats from being worn on campus so as not to make children from lower-income families feel self-conscious. But as well-intentioned as this new initiative might be, it does little to actually alleviate the problem, and its consequences actually do a great disservice to children.

Poverty Proofing

When the children from Woodchurch High School in Wirral, England, return from their winter break in a few weeks, they will no longer be allowed to wear coats made by Canada Goose, Moncler, or Pyrenex on school grounds. True, these “luxury” coats are anything but cheap, costing consumers anywhere from $350 to $955 per coat. But they are extremely high-quality and will keep you warm for several seasons to come, making the investment justifiable to many families.

To be clear, the decision to purchase expensive coats should be left to the families and specifically to the parents. Even so, the school believes there is no reason for students to have winter gear this luxurious and has moved forward with its prohibition on expensive outerwear.

Woodchurch High School’s Head Teacher, Rebekah Phillips, praised this new rule, saying, “We are very concerned about the fact that our children put a lot of pressure on parents to buy them expensive coats, a lot of parents at our school cannot afford that.” Speaking of the students, she continued, “They feel stigmatized, they feel left out, they feel inadequate.”

Poverty is a sensitive issue, and the school officials’ hearts are most certainly in the right place. But that doesn’t mean this new policy is positive or that it will do anything to actually help the students.

Poverty is a sensitive issue, and the school officials’ hearts are most certainly in the right place. But that doesn’t mean this new policy is positive or that it will do anything to actually help the students. On the contrary, it is sheltering them from the realities of the world we live in and teaching them to resent the wealth of others. And for those who do own these nicer coats, they are now made to feel as though wealth is something to be ashamed of.

The Problem with “Poverty Proofing”

Life is not poverty proof. And thank goodness for that. Unless we want to live in a political and economic climate where choice is abolished and force becomes our way of life, there will always be income inequality, and relative poverty will exist. But this doesn’t have to be viewed so negatively, nor does it mean the problem cannot be mitigated. And in fact, poverty is already decreasing.

Currently, global poverty is lower than ever thanks to more countries adopting free market capitalism, the same system that makes these prohibited coats available to those willing to purchase them. So while administrators try to use income inequality stats to justify their policies, the truth of the matter is that global poverty is not a growing problem but a shrinking one.

Since each individual is free to choose the profession of his or her choice, there will always be “income inequality.” A landscaper will likely not be compensated the same as a high-powered attorney. But this is not some inherent flaw in the system. Instead, it tells us that our economy thrives on specialization where each individual chooses their job based on their own set of wants and desires that might have nothing to do with money.

This is the world we live in: Some people have nicer homes than their peers, but that does not mean we should make all homes uniform so as not to offend anyone.

A parent’s inability or unwillingness to buy their child an expensive coat is not a symptom of a wider economic problem; it is merely a manifestation of priorities. You’ll notice that the problem at this UK school was not that too many children were without coats, but instead that some kids had nicer coats than others. This is the world we live in: Some people have nicer homes than their peers, but that does not mean we should make all homes uniform so as not to offend anyone. We should instead be thankful that so many people have homes at all.

Oddly enough, the reports of complaints about coat inequality at the school have all come from administrators and parents, not from the students themselves. But for any students who have somehow convinced themselves that someone else’s nice coat is a personal affront to their life situation, they have far bigger issues to deal with than winter coats.

The world owes you nothing. Being resentful and bitter about what someone else has won’t change that. So instead of being jealous about what someone else has, those in more strained financial situations would do well to use that want of finer material goods as a motivator to improve their lives.

Poverty Can Be a Powerful Tool

As a child, I always wondered why my father’s Little League picture was featured front and center on our living room mantel. It always struck me as weird that in the photo, one of his shoes was covered with a baseball glove while the other was hidden by his kneeling pose. Curious as to both the placement of this photo in our home and the reason for the glove covering his shoe, I pressed my father to tell me more about this photo.

His family’s inability to afford baseball shoes, while embarrassing at the time, fueled him to do whatever he could to provide a better life for his future children.

“My family couldn’t afford to buy the cleats that all the other players had,” he told me, “so the adults thought they would do me the courtesy of covering my regular, very worn shoes for the picture so no one saw.” My father grew up in impoverished circumstances, the likes of which I never had to experience. But his family’s inability to afford baseball shoes, while embarrassing at the time, fueled him to do whatever he could to provide a better life for his future children.

That picture sat on our mantel as a reminder to my father of how far he had come. Rather than being resentful or cursing the heavens for all the things he did not have access to as a child, he made it a priority to give me and my siblings a much better life than he had. I highly doubt the same lesson would have been learned had the adults in charge outlawed the use of expensive shoes on the field.

By allowing this ban to occur, the school’s administrators are robbing their students of the opportunity to learn valuable life lessons. And instead of being prepared for the real world, these students are being taught that every time someone else has something they do not, a central authority figure will swoop in and level the playing field.

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The world is in turmoil. From Russia, Turkey, and Egypt to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result, democracy itself may now be at risk.The People vs. Democracy is the first book to describe both how we got here and what we need to do now. For those unwilling to give up either individual rights or the concept of the popular will, Mounk argues that urgent action is needed, as this may be our last chance to save democracy.

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